Lovecraft 12
by Zodidj
Summary: A series of one shots told in the style and settings of the lovecraft works.
1. Chapter 1

Lovecraft ½

All of Lovecraft's work is public domain ;) so I don't even have to apologize for using it. His lawyers have all been eaten but deep ones.

This is really just a series of one shots, different Ranma characters playing their way through the various stories of Lovecraft lore. They may be OOC, they may not. It may be use to explain some more fantastical side of the show, or may just be used for my innate sadism. Either way it is what it is, a series of short stories. If anyone has read much Lovecraft, so are they. Its doubtful that any will be much longer than the story the characters interact with, and I may only write the two that have come to mind, or I may add to them. Travels in the realms of dreams and shadows are not always plottable.

Note : All of the names, and some of the actions of the Cthulhu stock charicters will be taken as close to the original as possible. I am trying to keep the mythos acurate while putting in different actions for the Ranma cast. Also Stylistically its going to be as close to the original feel of Lovecraft as possible. Its not lovecraftian to say something like "our in the distance lay the great Cthulhu and many other creatures." its lovecraftian to say "There lay great Cthulhu and his hordes, hidden in green slimy vaults and sending out at last, after cycles incalculable, the thoughts that spread fear to the dreams of the sensitive and called imperiously to the faithful to come on a pilgrimage of liberation and restoration."

Of the Chaos meeting it's Maker.

_From the memoirs of Ranma, later in life._

"_The Art, a profile of Excellence" by Ranma Meiou__"_

_Lightening publishing house_

_Eleventh edition, 2245._

I have often thought in the past that Kodachi Kuno held the long lost secrets of the Deep Ones in regards to her poisons, just Akane held those secrets in her cooking. I was the unending recipient of these compounds in her search for domination of me, though she never bested me. My resistance to her poisons was only helped along by Shampoo and her overuse of love potions and powders. Even with one as resistant as I, there were after effects. In my case, the worst of them came at the time I had finally decided to leave Nermia for good. In fact this may have been the catalyst of what prompted me to move on, and find my true Art, rather than the pale shadow it had been before. In the end as I have often said before, this was a defining time for me. the dreaming caused me to see the source of who I was, and where I had come from. If it were not for the efforts of the Queen, and my wife, I perhaps never would have recovered. Their efforts brought back both my sanity, and reason, freeing me to realize the difference of the limitations of the physical art, with the real power of an art balanced in mind, spirit and body.

Kodachi' s concoction was especially potent, and while I was able to fend her and my rivals off at that time, there was a darkness that settled on my mind. Dreams came to me. Dreams of realms both fantastic and terrifying, even beyond my view of cats, there were places I found in my mind that defied even my adaptability to comprehend. In the end many good things happened because of this, in meeting my wife, and finding my true self, but the path there was one of shadows and misery. It was from these dreams I found that my father was not who I thought and that I was not what they called a Chaos Generator. No, in fact I was the Son of Chaos itself, the shadow that comes with sharpened fangs and glowing eyes.

From these dreams brought on by her poisons few in the history of man knows more of the beauty, the terror, and the mystery of those obscure realms into which I, the inspired dreamer was transported. But much as has been told, Never have I yet dared intimate the _nature_ of the phantasms and horrors thus unfolded to my mind, or hint at the _direction_ of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and chaotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne. Shadows and flashes of light wrapped around sticky forms of the deepest darkness first invaded my dreams then my waking moments , conjuring up specters to haunt myself and those around me. More than once the Queen and her guards mistook me for a demon, thinking I was bringing these abominations to life in our world. In many ways they were correct, even if I had no control of them at the time. I was my Fathers son, and Chaos is what I am. The shadows merely responded to the power of a prince, unknowingly calling up an army to torment himself.

As I have said she had given me an overdose and combined with the other toxins sent me far into the dreamlands. Deeper than was on its own survivable. In my dream that sensation of dancing the winds permeated and enveloped me. But no matter how I tried, returning up at all was never an option, I could dance, but always down I traveled. After an aeon of falling, all of the pain from the poisons stopped all at once, and I could feel the rhythmic pounding of something reaching through the ground that had appeared below me. I could hear water, vast sounds of tides and breakers. I then opened my eyes.

For a moment my surroundings seemed confused Flashes of the stranger aspects in my life, projected outward accompanied by this constant beat of the drum forming from the ground. It permeated my sound and blinded me in part. The beat, beat of the drum, and the shifting shadows and lights of the road and hills around me drew my eyes to a far off mountain. Somehow deep in my soul I knew that at its peak lay a castle, that at its core held the course of this beating drum. In my drugged dreaming state I stood and gathered my strength for the trip ahead. As I staggered towards my eventual goal, I could see the shadows of my own life. The shadow of saffron, standing over my fallen corpse, with his arm around Akane, Ryouga in a tuxedo and me dressed in a black wedding outfit, standing before Kuno, who was officiating over us. More dark shadows, Cologne tossing water on my, and I could only change from cat into girl. Farther back, illusions of deeper fears, Kneeling in front of my mother, her demanding my death, and declaring that I would even sully the honor blade so only given a common kitchen knife to end my own. An image of Kasumi looking down on me, frowning. And with each image beyond it a small flame grew brighter and brighter, until the last one, Genma standing before me, telling me what he did on the trip was out of pity. Pity for the miserable child I was. Pity for what I would become.

As I past the last image and the shadows cleared before me I could see the flames all came from a central force, a pillar of flames that turned and twisted into the darkness. As I moved past it, it took up a place next to me, its heat burning and peeling my flesh. This flame had a name, right at the edge of my tongue. It struck something primal in me, something I could feel went beyond this husk of humanity my being was encased in. In the same instant the conscious thought of my own inhumanity, and the realization that I had existed long before humans had ever walked came the realization of this pillar of flames true name. of its kinship to myself, though I still would not face who and what I was, or what I needed to be. A second drum in my head, pulsing like the on and off roaring of an inferno held its name in my mind. Cthuga, the flame incarnate.

Without words she greeted me and equal in stature though not in place. Travel with me and her presence burned back the shadows of humanity that plagued my vision leaving behind again the start alien-ness of the dream world around me. Now while the mountain was still far off, there stood a building, that had not been there before. Shutters half hung off of the windows, shades twisted beyond them. A door, with a multipronged curling star embossed on it. As I entered the room, I felt like it was an entirely different room than the worn exterior would have led me to believe. Inside it was lighted with many bright colors coming in seeming from the grey dirty windows. Of the exact nature of this room, its function and even its form, I had no idea for my thoughts were still far from settled; but I noticed vari-coloured rugs and draperies, elaborately fashioned tables, chairs, ottomans, and divans, and delicate vases and ornaments which conveyed a suggestion of the exotic without being actually alien. These things I noticed, yet they were not long uppermost in my mind. I could feel both a fear of this place along with a deep rightness of it all. The shifting adapting nature of the room was the right and proper way of doing things it seemed. I could sent that the pillar of flame followed me in, yet when I turned to look at it, I could see it had changed to become my girl form, a brightly colored redhead, in my traditional red's and blacks. That Cthuga appeared as my girl form, or perhaps my girl form took that shape neither surprised nor dismayed me. it was, as this room, and this dream itself was. In to relative comfort of this room, I felt drawn to look at her, and could see in her eyes a dispassion that my human self-drew back from, in absolute terror. It was like watching something larger than the universe itself that was too small to see. Her eyes look at the universe in a way I could never grasp. Yet part of me felt if I opened my eyes I could see what she saw, and relish in it. My humanity could feel its horror though. Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness, and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace—not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.

The secureness of this room and the comfort of my surrounding could not stop that throbbing droning noise reaching through the ground and air. Beat, Beat it still came. I both wanted to seek out that sound, and continue on my path as I was to draw myself back to my starting point, to find my way back to the world I had come from. One window seemed to flash at me, and I felt drawn to its presence. Looking beyond it I could see the waters of a sea had formed outside of this place, with swirling colors, and shifting shapes moving within it. I noticed a door that had not been there before, and opened it. Within it I beheld a small and richly draped corridor ending in a carven door and large oriel window. Out of this window I could see much.

I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of Kodachi' s toxins. The building stood on a narrow point of land—or what was _now_ a narrow point of land—fully 300 feet above what must lately have been a seething vortex of mad waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling in frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation. Out a mile or more there rose and fell menacing breakers at least fifty feet in height, and on the far horizon ghoulish black clouds of grotesque contour were resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures. The waves were dark and purplish, almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if with uncouth, greedy hands. I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted by the angry sky.

I passed through the door and felt as the door locked behind me. In front of somehow was Cthuga, back in the form of flames, waiting for me. I saw more of the strange lands around me, where from inside I was hundreds of feet above the waves, not I could walk down to the edges of the mass. There was a pillar marking a decided division between two worlds, or views. The pillar of flame stood directly before this pillar, and I could see where her heat twisted the air above her the two side merged into some third reality. On the on side was the swirling mass of chaos, and darkness. Yet the other, the right handed path went inland, I could see a massive valley covering hundreds of acres, and covered in a silvery grow of vegetation, higher than my head. At the end of this valley stood a magnificent tree that seemed to ask me to come to it. Its vast foliage was also silver, and oddly match what I new saw as a vibrant purple sky. The sun seemed odd, twisted somehow though I could not see why. I started to move to this magnificent valley when the flames pulled me back, telling me that there was a reason not to go there. Some beat swishing in the tall grass, and I could sense the prowling of one of those beasts. Whether or not I would allow myself to be swayed from my fear was irrelevant however. The tree pulled me, so I moved towards it, with Cthuga following close behind. I resolved to fight for my life and mind as long as possible in this strange realm. The grass started its own noise, merging with the beating drum, and the roar of the waves.

There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret. At the end however I was standing under the tree itself, and a silver haired girl dropped from its branches. This child held innocent beauty such as I had never seen before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blended with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk below the horizon, and in the twilight I saw that an areola of lambent light encircled the child's head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: "It is the end. They have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe." As the child spoke, I beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising greeted a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god and goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my hands, saying, "Come, child, you have heard the voices, and all is well. In Teloe beyond the Milky Way and the Arinurian streams are cities all of amber and chalcedony. And upon their domes of many facets glisten the images of strange and beautiful stars. Under the ivory bridges of Teloe flow rivers of liquid gold bearing pleasure-barges bound for blossomy Cytharion of the Seven Suns. And in Teloe and Cytharion abide only youth, beauty, and pleasure, nor are any sounds heard, save of laughter, song, and the lute. Only the gods dwell in Teloe of the golden rivers, but among them shalt thou dwell." The humanity within me moved towards them, yet that other side pulled back. The pillar next to me also moved attempting to block these two gods from taking me away, to whatever place they would travel. But still I listened to them.

As I listened, enchanted, I suddenly became aware of a change in my surroundings. The palm tree, so lately overshadowing my exhausted form, was now some distance to my left and considerably below me. I was obviously floating in the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and the radiant pair, but by a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and maidens with wind-blown hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered in my ear that I must look always upward to the pathways of light, and never backward to the sphere I had just left. The youths and maidens now chanted to the accompaniment of lutes, and I felt enveloped in a peace and happiness more profound than any I had in life imagined, when the intrusion of a single sound altered my destiny and shattered my soul. Through the ravishing strains of the singers and the lutanists, as if in mocking, demoniac concord, throbbed from gulfs below the damnable, the detestable pounding of that hideous ocean. And as those black breakers beat their message into my ears I forgot the words of the child and looked back, down upon the doomed scene from which I thought I had escaped.

Down through the ether, I could see myself standing with Cthuga and a huge formless mass. The earth below was twisting and tuning ever angry at the seas, and wilds upon it. Under a ghastly moonlight I have no words to describe, were vile things I can never forget even after being cleansed by the Queen. A rending report clove into the night, and from this rift the earth was encompassed by a great desert. I was still looking down at myself, but also look out of myself that stood below. The tower of flame, stood silent yet the mass had changed form, into a enrapturing woman/man who looked at me. it had long silver hair, and its voice was both melodic and demonic all at once.

"Hail Ankor, Son of the great Chaos itself. Hail and well met my son, for I am he who created you. I am the crawling chaos, the harbinger of the greater cold. I am Narphlothotep , the shifting chaos. You are of me and mine, and eternally shall be."

As I looked at this figure, I felt myself being drawn back into one view, one perspective again. Its face grinned at me, and while I could never focus on any of it, I felt it growing deeper and deeper into my head.

"Join us son, join us and consume the universe"

That was the last of those visions I saw. When I awoke, I found myself leaning on a door, my finger pressed against a bell, ringing for someone to open it. A woman answered, with green hair and red eyes. A woman who I have spent every day thereafter with learning to be more than human, more than inhuman and more that what I would have become. I knew then that part of what I was had been shown to me in that dream. That I was not human in a pure sense and chaos to me was more than something that affected me, or was created by me. It was my legacy. I was the immortal son of Chaos itself.

Kodachi was many things that I don't recommend, but in one thing she was brilliant. Kodachi Kuno held the long lost secrets of the Deep Ones in regards to her poisons, and without them, I never would have been able to create my legacy.

AN:

These are oneshots ;) Its diffucult for me to think about a continuation while in the lovecraft vein. However, If I get enough requests for a specific story, I may bakc some of the lovecraft infuence off and start a different story with that idea.

For an example, it was suggested a meeting of The Son of Chaos and the Avatar of chaos. That would not fit as a true lovecraft theme story, but it would fit into a lovecraft influenced crossover.

So if you have specifc things you want to suggest, let me know, and I will consider it.


	2. Chapter 2

The Nermia Horror

"Amazons, and Musk, and Jusenkyo—dire stories of Loo Fa and the other Harpies—may reproduce themselves in the brain of superstition—_but they were there before._ They are transcripts, types—the archetypes are in us all, and eternal in their monstrous dominion. How else should the recital of that which we know in a waking sense to be false come to affect us at all? Is it that we naturally conceive terror from such beings, considered in their capacity of being able to inflict upon us bodily injury? O, least of all! _These terrors are of older standing._ _They date beyond our modern world_—or without their laws, they would have been the same. . . . That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual—that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy—they are the difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadow land of pre-existence."

—_Tofu Ono_: "Amazons and Other Night-Fears"

When a traveller in north central Tokyo takes the wrong fork in Juuban, sometimes they end up in an unexpected place. They will come upon the land most cursed by the Clan Hibiki, a lonely and curious district with long shadows and dark designs. Going further on, the wooden walls press closer and closer against the slim pathway of the road, giving them a feeling of impending dread of pains and shadows yet to come. The trees of the frequent city parks seem too large, and there are wild weeds, brambles, and grasses that have grown to attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time in the windows of the houses, potted plants appear singularly few and barren; while the tightly packed houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the uneven rock filled streets. Those figures are so silent and furtive that one feels somehow confronted by forbidden things, with which it would be better to have nothing to do. When a rise in the road brings the larger estates into view above the simpler homes, the feeling of strange uneasiness is increased. The estates are too rounded and symmetrical to give a sense of comfort and naturalness, and sometimes the sky silhouettes with especial clearness the queer circles these estates form around a broken down huge estate that a cloud of miasma forms around its towers.  
Potholes and rocks of problematical depth and size are scattered on the stony road, and the crude chain link fences always seem of dubious safety. When the road dips again there are stretches of the marshy ditches that one instinctively dislikes, and indeed almost fears at evening when indiscernible shadows chatter and glowing red eyes come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs. The thin, shining line of the Furinkan High school upper tower has an oddly serpent-like suggestion as it winds close to the feet of the domed hills among which it rises.  
As the school draws nearer, one heeds its broken walls more than its grand clock tower. Those walls loom up so darkly and precipitously that one wishes they would keep their distance, but there is no entrance that will allow any escape from them. Across a blood stained court yard one sees a small figure huddled between a tree and the vertical slope of high school walls, and wonders at the cluster of rotting clothes and equipment bespeaking an earlier battle of some unknown magnitude. It is not reassuring to see, on a closer glance, that most of the windows are broken and falling to ruin, and that the beyond the school one broken-steepled church now harbors' one slovenly mercantile establishment of the hamlet. One dreads to trust the tenebrous doors of the school, yet there is no way to avoid it. Once inside, it is hard to prevent the impression of a faint, malign odor about rusting lockers, as of the massed mold and decay of centuries. Fluorescent lights crackle on and off with a humming noise reminiscent of some insane woman's cackle, almost driving one mad all on its own. It is always a relief to get clear of the place, and to follow the narrow road around the district and across the level country beyond till it rejoins the road into Tomboki. Afterward one sometimes learns that one has been through Nerima.

Outsiders visit Nermia as seldom as possible, and since a certain season of horror all the signboards pointing toward it have been taken down. The scenery, judged by any ordinary aesthetic canon, is more than commonly beautiful; yet there is no influx of artists or summer tourists. Two years ago, when talk of sorcerers-blood, panties-worship, and strange martial artists was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age—since the Nermia horror of 1998 was hushed up by those who had the town's and the world's welfare at heart—people shun it without knowing exactly why. Perhaps one reason—though it cannot apply to uninformed strangers—is that the natives are now repellently decayed, having gone far along that path of retrogression so common in many of Japans backwaters. They have come to form a race by themselves, steeped in perversion and brutishness, with the well-defined mental and physical stigmata of degeneracy and inbreeding. The average of their intelligence is woefully low, whilst their annals reek of overt viciousness and of half-hidden murders, incests, and deeds of almost unnamable violence and perversity. The old gentry, representing the two or three armigerous families which came from Tokyo in 1692, have kept somewhat above the general level of decay; though many branches are sunk into the sordid populace so deeply that only their names remain as a key to the origin they disgrace. Some of the Kuno's and Tendo's still send their eldest daughters to Todai and Nekomi, though those seldom return to the moldering gambrel roofs under which they and their ancestors were born.  
No one, even those who have the facts concerning the recent horror, can say just what is the matter with Nermia; though local legends speak of unhallowed cooking and conclaves of the fiancée's, amidst which they called forbidden shapes of old ghouls and gnomes out of the great rounded hills, and made wild orgiastic prayers that were answered by loud cracking's and rumblings from the ground below. In 1987 the Doctor Tofu Ono, newly come to the Nermia city council in nermia, preached a memorable sermon on the close presence of Happosai and his imps; in which he said:

"It must be allow'd, that these Blasphemies of an infernal Troll of Daemons are Matters of too common Knowledge to be deny'd; the cursed Voices of _Happosai _and _Herb,_ of _Ryouga _and Akane_,_ being heard now from under Ground by above a Score of credible Witnesses now living. I myself did not more than a day ago catch a very plain Discourse of an evil voice, The vile "hotcha' in the yard behind my clinic; wherein there were a Rattling and Rolling, Groaning, Screeching, and Hissing, such as no Things of this Earth cou'd raise up, and which must needs have come from those Caves from which he escaped, and only he could unbar.

Mr. Ono disappeared soon after delivering this speech; but the text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. Noises in the hills continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.  
Other traditions tell of foul odors near the darkness-crowning circles of stone around the Tendo Dojo, and of rushing hairy presences, once thought to be food, to be heard faintly at certain hours from stated points at the bottom of the great Koi pond; while still others try to explain the Devil's Hochta bag—a bleak, blasted carryall that drifts across the rooftops with naught a single person holding it. Then too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous cats which grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in demoniac laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.  
These tales, of course, are obsolete and ridiculous; because they come down from very old times. Nermia is indeed ridiculously old—older by far than any of the communities within thirty miles of it. South of the village one may still spy the cellar walls and chimney of the ancient Kuno manor, which was built before 1700; whilst the ruins of the Okonomiyaki shop which appears more worn, form the most modern piece of architecture to be seen. Industry did not flourish here, and the twentieth-century construction movement proved short-lived. Deposits of skulls and bones, found within the Kuno manor and around the sizeable table-like rock on in its front courtyard, sustain the popular belief that such spots were once the dwelling place of Kodachi; even though many ethnologists, disregarding the absurd improbability of such a theory, persist in believing the remains left there are Caucasian.

It was in the township of Nermia, in a large and partly inhabited dojo set in the circle of estates, that Ranma Saotome at . on Sunday, the second of February, 1983. This date was recalled because it was Candlemas, which people in Nermia curiously observe under another name; and because the noises in the hills had sounded, and all the cats of the countryside had yowled persistently, throughout the night before. Less worthy of notice was the fact that the mother was one of the decadent Kuno's, a somewhat deformed, mentally unattractive redheaded woman of forty-five, her family an aged and half-insane father about whom the most frightful tales of tropical insanity had been whispered in his youth. Nodoka Kuno had a long dead husband, but according to the custom of the region made no attempt to enforce a contract the particulars were the seppuku of her child; concerning the other side of whose ancestry the residents of nermia might—and did—speculate as widely as they chose. On the contrary, she seemed strangely proud of the dark haired, feminine-looking boy who formed such a contrast to her own sickly and wild-eyed mania, and was heard to mutter many curious prophecies about his unusual powers and tremendous ability in the Art.

Nodoka was one who would be apt to mutter such things, for she was a lone creature given to wandering amidst thunderstorms in the town, with a silk wrapped bundle and trying to read the great odorous books which her father had inherited through two centuries of Kunos, and which were fast falling to pieces with age and worm-holes. She had never been to school, but was filled with disjointed scraps of ancient lore that Grandfather Kuno had taught her. The remote farmhouse had always been feared because of Kodachi' s reputation for black magic, and the unexplained death by violence of Grandfather Tenma Kuno when Nodoka was twelve years old had not helped to make the place popular. Isolated among strange influences, Nodoka was fond of wild and grandiose day-dreams and singular obsessions about grandchildren; nor was her leisure much taken up by household cares in a home from which all standards of order and cleanliness had long since disappeared. Indeed even the structure itself had fallen, after a disastrous attempt to wed her son off to the witch of the Tendo family.  
There was a hideous screaming which echoed above even the hill noises and the cats' yowling on the night Ranma arrived, but no known doctor or Amazon presided at his coming. Neighbors knew nothing of him till a week afterward, when the Panda drove his Ranma through the Tendo Dojo wall and into a Nermia stop sign, Ranma cursing incoherently to the group of loungers at out in the road. There seemed to be a change in the air—an added element of furtiveness and incipient violence in the clouded brain which subtly transformed everyone's view of the dojo from an object to a subject of fear—though they was not one to be perturbed by any common event.

"I dun't keer what folks think—ef Nodoka's's boy look's like a girl, he wouldn't look like nothin' ye expeck. Ye needn't think the only folks is the folks hereabaouts. Nodoka's read some, an' has seed some things the most o' ye only tell abaout. I calc'late her man was as no good as a husban' as ye kin find this side of Tomboki; an' ef ye knowed as much abaout the districts as I dew, ye wouldn't ast no better place nor her'n. Let me tell ye suthin'—_some day yew folks'll hear a child o' Nodoka's a-callin' its father's name on the top o' the school towah!"_  
The only persons who saw Ranma during the first month of his life in nermia were the Tendo family ,of the abborent Tendo's, and Yuriko okami, an elderly lady who spent every morning properly cleaning her porch. Youriko's understanding if the boy was frankly one of curiosity, and her subsequent tales did justice to her observations. Ukyou Kounji came to later along about the same time as a pair of Amazons of which one claimed to be the wife of said boy. This marked the beginning of a course of Fiancée battles on the part of Akane Tendo, Ukyou Kounji and Shampoo of the amazons. Which ended in 2001, when the Nermia horror came and went; yet at no time did the ramshackle Tendo dojo barn seem overcrowded with residents. There came a period when people were curious enough to steal up and count the fiancée's who battled there on the Dojo floor next to the old Tendo manor. Usually they could never find more than ten or twelve amours, blood lusting-looking specimens. Evidently some blight or distemper, perhaps sprung from the unwholesome childhood or the diseased father and curses of the filthy panda, caused a heavy toll amongst the frenzied women. Odd wounds or sores, having something of the aspect of incisions, seemed to afflict the them all

In the spring after Ranma's arrival Nodoka resumed her customary rambles in the town, bearing in her disproportioned arms the silk bundle. Public interest in the Tendo's and Saotomes subsided after most of the city folk had seen the him fight, and paid the price for it in yen to the Tendo's and no one bothered to comment on the swift development of construction that that the newcomer seemed every day to require. Ranma's powers were indeed phenomenal, for within three months of his arival he had attained a size and muscular power not usually found in grown masters of the martial arts. His motions and even his vocal sounds skewed a restraint and deliberateness highly peculiar in a modern teen, and no one was really unprepared when, at seven months, he began attract numerous rivals, all of whom he eventually bested, no matter what their respective power or ability was.

It was somewhat after this time—on Hallowe'en—that a great blaze was seen at midnight on the top of the school tower where an old table now stands amidst its tumulus of ancient bones. Considerable talk was started when Ukari Amosha—of the twisted amosha's—mentioned having seen the boy running sturdily up the road to the school ahead of his mother about an hour before the blaze was remarked. Ukari was rounding up a stray kitten, but she nearly forgot her mission when she fleetingly spied the two figures in the dim light of street lamps. They darted almost noiselessly through the town, and the astonished watcher seemed to think they were entirely unclothed. Afterward she could not be sure about the boy, who may have had some kind of a fringed belt and a pair of dark trunks or trousers on.  
The next January gossips were mildly interested in the fact that "Nodoka's's black haired baka", as Akane was known to call him, had commenced to start to refuse contact with his finacee's sometimes pushing them back hard until they left him alone, His speech was somewhat remarkable both because of its difference from the ordinary accents of the region, and because it displayed an innocence around women of which many monks might well be proud. The boy was not talkative, yet when he spoke he seemed to reflect some elusive element wholly unpossessed by Nermia and its denizens. The strangeness did not reside in what he said, or even in the simple idioms he used; but seemed vaguely linked with his intonation or with the internal organs that produced the spoken sounds. His facial aspect, too, was remarkable for its maturity; for though he shared his mother's and grandfather's chinlessness, his firm and precociously shaped nose united with the expression of his large, dark, almost Latin eyes to give him an air of quasi-adulthood and well-nigh preternatural intelligence. He was, however, exceedingly skittish of women despite his constant attractions by them; there being something almost tomboyish or animalistic about his thick and often abusing fiancé's. He was soon disliked even more decidedly than his mother and grandsire, and all conjectures about him were spiced with references to the bygone perversions of the ancient demon Happosai, and how the their homes once shook when he shrieked the dreadful name of _Yog-Sothoth_ in the midst of a circle of estates with a great book open in his arms before him. Cats abhorred the boy, and he was always obliged to take various defensive measures against their yowling menace.

To be continued

A/N : Only so much of this I can do in a sitting. Kinda disturbing this one with Kuno being Ranma's cousin, and Nodoka being Kodachi's aunt. Ahh well, that is Nermia for you


End file.
